CURRENT AFFAIRS: 10.06.2017

1.    Aadhaar a “transformational homegrown IT project”

·        According to the Centre, the fundamental right of identity and various e-governance initiatives of the government to provide food security, Livelihood, jobs and health to the “teeming masses” cannot be sacrificed at the altar of right to privacy for few peoples.

·        Centre pushed for Aadhaar in the Supreme Court by providing official statistics on its impact on a multitude of schemes across the country which includes

Ø DBT: Direct Benefit Transfer scheme via Aadhaar saved Rs. 49,560 crore in 2014-2015 and 2015-2016.

Ø PDS: Aadhaar led to the deletion of 2.33 crore fake ration cards and saved Rs. 14,000 crore up to December 2016 in Public Distribution System.

Ø Banking: over 7.35 crore bank accounts opened using e-KYC service.

Ø Passports: over 1.36 crore residents obtained their passports using Aadhar.

Ø LPG: over 3 crore fake/duplicate LPG connections weeded out, resulting in savings of over Rs. 26,000 crore upto December 2016.

Ø MNREGS: Aadhaar number linked to over 8.80 crore active MNREGS workers of the existing database of 10.38 crore active workers.

Ø INCOME TAX: Aadhar enabled income tax payers to e-verify their tax returns using Aadhaar OTP authentication.

Ø PENSION: Seeding of Aadhaar with Jeevan Pramaan sees 71.17 lakh pensioners use the scheme in 2016. Digital signatures used in National Pension Scheme accounts.

Ø BIOMETRIC ATTENDANCE: Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance system is now available in 660 organisations.

Source: The Hindu

2.    Bioethanol use

·        The Centre is going to unveil a policy on the production of second-generation ethanol from biomass, which will be a “game changer” for farmers.

·        The petroleum Ministry had taken the initiative to get pacts signed with 15 industrial units for bioethanol production.

·        Ethanol could be produces from paddy and wheat straw, bagasse, biomass, segregated municipal waste and bamboo.

·        By converting agricultural waste into bioethanol, farmers would be diversified from burning paddy straw.

BIOETHANOL

Ø The principle fuel used as a petrol substitute for road transport vehicles is bioethanol.

Ø It is mainly produced by the sugar or maize fermentation process.

Ø It comes from a renewable resource i.e. crops.

Ø Other major applications of bioethanol include the following:

o   Fuel for power generation by thermal combustion.

o   Fuel in cogeneration systems.

o   Feedstock in the chemicalsindustry.

o   Fuel for fuel cells by thermochemical reactions.

Source: The Hindu

3.    Unclaimed PF to fund medical costs

·        Saving remaining unclaimed in dormant Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) accounts for seven years will be used to fund a new scheme for providing medical benefits to pensioners under the EPF scheme, according to Labour Ministry.

·        The committee of secretaries, recently directed the Labour Ministry to frame a scheme, for the benefit of senior citizens who are PF subscribers, from inoperative account funds.

·        The scheme will be contributory in nature with EPF pensioners contributing a portion of their income towards the medical scheme and rest flowing from inoperative accounts of the EPFO.

·        After the implementation of the scheme, the EPF pensioners will be able to avail medical facilities from a network of more than 1,400 dispensaries and 150 hospitals under ESIC across the country.

·        EPF money becomes unclaimed after a subscriber doesn’t withdraw money after reaching 61 years of age. Account also become inoperative if persons settling abroad do not withdraw their money within three years.

Source: The Hindu

4.    Centre to chart digital roadmap

·        Roundtable of senior industry representatives will be held on June 16 in New Delhi to develop India a $1 trillion digital economy.

·        The roundtable will be chaired by the Minister of Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad.

·        The government has partnered with the industry in the design of new services and platforms like MyGov, Digital Locker, e-Sign, Cloud Services, Government e-market-place, eNational agriculture Markets etc.

·        The centre aims to grow India’s digital economy to $1 trillion by 2022.

·        Present size of India’s digital economy, which included IT and IT-enabled services, telecommunication, e-commerce and digital payments, was about $400 billion currently.

Source: The Hindu

5.    SATH programme launched by NITI Aayog

·        A programme providing ‘Sustainable Action for Transforming Human capital’ with the State Governments.

·        The vision of the program is to initiate transformation in the education and health sectors.

·        The program addresses the need expressed by many states for technical support from NITI.

·        SATH aims to identify and build three future ‘role model’ states for health systems.

·        NITI will work in close collaboration with their state machinery to design a robust roadmap of intervention, develop a program governance structure, set up monitoring and tracking mechanisms, hand-hold state institutions through the execution stage and provide support on a range of institutional measures to achieve the end objectives.

·         The program will be implemented by NITI along with McKinsey & Company and IPE Global consortium, who were selected through a competitive bidding process.

·        To select the three model states, NITI defined a three-stage process – expression of interest, presentations by the states and assessment of commitment to health sector reforms.

·         NITI invited all states and UTs to participate in the program.

·         The program will be launched in the three selected states after the signing of MoUs.

Source: PIB

JOIN GENERAL AWARENESS TELEGRAM GROUP

QUESTIONS BASED ON

CURRENT AFFAIRS: 10.06.2017

1.    Which schemes benefited by Aadhaar card?

(i)                       Direct Benefit Transfer

(ii)                   Banking

(iii)                LPG

(iv)                 MGNREGA

(a)              i and ii

(b)             ii and iii

(c)              i and iv

(d)             all of the above

2.    Which of the following is/are correct for Bioethanol?

(i)                       Used as a petrol substitute for road transport vehicles.

(ii)                   It comes from a non-renewable resource.

(a)              i only

(b)             ii only

(c)              both i and ii are correct

(d)             none of the above

3.    EPF money becomes unclaimed after a subscriber doesn’t withdraw money after reaching ______ years of age.

(a)              58

(b)             60

(c)              61

(d)             65

4.    Present size of India’s digital economy, which included IT and IT-enabled services, telecommunication, e-commerce and digital payments is about how many billion currently?

(a)              100

(b)             200

(c)              300

(d)             400

5.    SATH programme is launched by whom?

(a)              Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.

(b)             NITI Aayog

(c)              Labour Ministry

(d)             Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution.

                               ANSWERS

                          1.  (d)

                               2.  (a)